[% setvar title Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030713 %]
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<a name='Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030713'></a><h1>Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030713</h1>
<p>Welcome once again to the Perl 6 Summary, in a week of major
developments and tantalizing hints.</p>
<p>Starting, as usual, with what's happening in perl6-internals</p>
<a name='Targeting Parrot from GCC'></a><h2>Targeting Parrot from GCC</h2>
<p>Discussion in the thread entitled 'WxWindows Support / Interfacing
Libraries' centred on writing a Parrot backend to GCC. (No, I have no
idea what that has to do with the thread subject.) Tupshin Harper, Leo
T&ouml;tsch and Benjamin Goldberg discussed possibilities and
potential pit/pratfalls. At one point, Tupshin suggested emulating a
'more traditional stack-oriented processor' and I don't think he was
joking...</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3F0C7891.9060603@tupshin.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Timely destruction and TRACE_SYSTEM_AREAS'></a><h2>Timely destruction and <code>TRACE_SYSTEM_AREAS</code></h2>
<p>J&uuml;rgen B&ouml;mmels' rewrite of Parrot IO is causing some
problems with the garbage collection (IO handles are the canonical
examples of resources that need timely destruction).</p>
<p>Leo tracked down the source of resource leak to a problem with handles
being found on the C stack. J&uuml;rgen wasn't happy about this (he's
not keen on the stack walking approach to garbage collection). He
proposed that we get rid of the stack walk in favour of some other
solution to the infant mortality problem and offered a few
candidates. Leo said that he didn't like walking the C stack, going so
far as to state that &quot;Timely destruction and solving infant mortality
don't play together or are mutually exclusive - in the current
approach.&quot; Dan hasn't commented on this yet.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200307070855.h678tU603505@thu8.leo.home' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Parrot is not feature frozen'></a><h2>Parrot is not feature frozen</h2>
<p>There was a certain amount of confusion as some old email with the
subject 'Parrot is feature-frozen until Wednesday' made its way into a
small number of inboxes sowing confusion as it went. Suffice to say,
Parrot is not currently feature frozen, though Steve Fink did say that
he was considering a point release once the imcc/parrot integration
was complete. If Dan gets objects and exceptions finished, then it
might even warrant a 0.1.0 version number rather than 0.0.11</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200307071153.h67BrdD12034@thu8.leo.home' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Perl* Abstraction'></a><h2>Perl* Abstraction</h2>
<p>Luke Palmer has &quot;finally&quot; started to implement his Infinity PMC and
has noticed a lot of redundant code in the Perl* classes. He also
noticed that Parrot doesn't seem to have the distinction between
container and value that has been confusing people on the language
list.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=ygche5yyspa.fsf@babylonia.flatirons.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Fun with ParrotIO'></a><h2>Fun with ParrotIO</h2>
<p>First, J&uuml;rgen B&ouml;mmels sent in a patch to excise integer
file descriptors from Parrot except when they are managed via ParrotIO
PMCs. Leo applied this.</p>
<p>Clinton Pierce thought that this patch meant that a Win32 bug could be
closed in the Parrot bug database. This sparked a discussion with Leo,
and J&uuml;rgen, but I'm not entirely sure of the status of the bug...</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-22899-60490.17.7794643303328@rt.perl.org' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200307081114828.SM00133@localhost' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Jako groks basic PMCs'></a><h2>Jako groks basic PMCs</h2>
<p>Gregor N Purdy seems to have started working on Jako again, and
checked in some changes allowing Jako to manipulate PMCs. People
agreed that this was cool.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1057700664.16182.2.camel@borg.focusresearch.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='I want a Ponie!'></a><h2>I want a Ponie!</h2>
<p>The <i><a href='http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?<a href='mailto:ponie-dev@perl.org'>ponie-dev@perl.org</a>'>p<a href='mailto:onie-dev@perl.org'>onie-dev@perl.org</a></a></i> mailing list was announced and I'll be
summarizing it as of next week when I've joined, caught up, and
generally recovered from America.</p>
<p>What's Ponie? Ponie is 'Perl On New Internal Architecture' or, as
Thomas Klausner put it, &quot;A version of Perl 5 that will run on Parrot&quot;,
which was announced by Larry at his OSCON 'State of the Onion'
address.</p>
<p>Discussion of Ponie on the perl6-internals list centred on the &quot;What
is ponie?&quot; question, with a certain amount of &quot;Why ponie-dev, not
perl6-ponie?&quot; thrown in for good measure.</p>
<p>Brian Ingerson announced that he'd set up a Ponie Wiki, Leon Brocard
pointed at the use.perl story announcing Ponie, and your summarizer
punted on writing a description of the project himself.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030709175831.D52652-100000@onion.valueclick.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><i><a href='#!dl/www.poniecode.org/'>&quot;!dl/<a href='http://www.poniecode.org/' target='_blank'>www.poniecode.org</a>&quot;</a></i> -- More on Ponie</p>
<p><a href='http://ponie.kwiki.org/' target='_blank'>ponie.kwiki.org</a> -- Ingy's Ponie Wiki</p>
<p><a href='http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/09/0237202' target='_blank'>use.perl.org</a> -- use.perl announcement</p>
<a name='Exceptions!'></a><h2>Exceptions!</h2>
<p>Leo T&ouml;tsch checked in the beginnings of an exceptions
system. Then he checked in the beginnings of an events system.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3F0D414C.7070302@nextra.at' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3F0EA7CA.7020404@nextra.at' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Meanwhile, in perl6-language'></a><h1>Meanwhile, in perl6-language</h1>
<p>There were all of 6 messages, all of them discussing the effects of
aliasing an array slice.</p>
<p><a href='http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20030707080359.A75579@megazone.bigpanda.com' target='_blank'>groups.google.com</a></p>
<a name='Perl 6 Rules at OSCON'></a><h2>Perl 6 Rules at OSCON</h2>
<p>No, wait, that should be Perl6::Rules.</p>
<p>For his last talk at OSCON, Damian spoke about Perl6::Rules, his
implementation of Perl 6's rules system in pure Perl 5. And oh boy was
it tantalizing. He showed us something actually running a large chunk
of Perl 6 matching semantics, complete with handy debugging
information, diagnostic dumping and all the other useful stuff.</p>
<p>When we were all gagging for him to release it to CPAN immediately, he
told us that it wasn't finished yet; that he'd implemented it all
during the week of OSCON, in 700 lines of code; that he was going on
holiday for a month once he got home; and that the module would be
completed and released to CPAN as time/money allowed and would be out
by Christmas.</p>
<p>He didn't say which Christmas.</p>
<p>Trust me, we want this. A lot.</p>
<a name='Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies'></a><h1>Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies</h1>
<p>Hmm... this summary's later than last week's how did that happen?</p>
<p>Thanks to Darren Stalder and Cindy Fry, our kind hosts in Seattle; to
Shiro san for some fantastic sushi on Sunday night; to Jesse Broksmith
and Melissa Cain for being our Seattle native guides; to Ward
Cunningham for a lift in his Jeep and for just being Ward; and to
Casey West for reasons I promised not to go into in the summary.</p>
<p>For months now, I've been half joking about sending me jobs in the
last little bit of this summary, but I really mean it now. If anyone's
looking for an experienced OO Perl programmer and half experienced
writer, I'm hunting work. Please get in touch at the address below.</p>
<p>As ever, if you've appreciated this summary, please consider one or
more of the following options:</p>
<ul>
<li><a name='Send money to the Perl Foundation at donate.perl-foundation.org/ and help support the ongoing development of Perl.'></a>Send money to the Perl Foundation at
<a href='http://donate.perl-foundation.org/' target='_blank'>donate.perl-foundation.org</a> and help support the ongoing
development of Perl.</li>
<li><a name='Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open to all. dev.perl.org/perl6/ and www.parrotcode.org/ are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing lists.'></a>Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open  to
all. <a href='http://dev.perl.org/perl6/' target='_blank'>dev.perl.org</a> and <a href='http://www.parrotcode.org/' target='_blank'>www.parrotcode.org</a>
are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing lists.</li>
<li><a name='Send feedback, flames, money, photographic and writing commissions, or a cute little iSight to p<a href='mailto:6summarizer@bofh.org.uk'>6summarizer@bofh.org.uk</a>.'></a>Send feedback, flames, money, photographic and writing commissions, or
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